Norwegian Epic: My First Ever Cruise!

Our Company, Inteletravel, had their annual convention Intele Quest onboard the Norwegian Epic between the 2nd and 7th March 2019. This event was announced & sold out long before I joined the company, yet somehow, I managed to get a place last minute. I was over the moon to be part of something very innovative by my company and of course to be going on a cruise for the first time. There were nearly 2500 Independent Travel agents from the USA and the UK.

It was a Western Caribbean cruise from Port Canaveral. I had no idea about how cruises work. My husband and I booked ourselves a balcony cabin on Deck 8. All travel agents were given complimentary Wi-Fi and drinks package, worth more than $400, which saved us a fortune. However, we still had to pay for bottle of water! Don't understand the logic behind it though!

We arrived in Florida the night before and stayed at Best Western Cocoa Beach Hotel near the port. Luckily for us, the shuttle driver told us about the scheduled Space X launch that night. We went to Cocoa Beach behind the hotel to watch the launch. It was a surreal experience to be in that beach, in dark waiting for the launch. Then, on time, SpaceX launched its Falcon 9 with a crew Dragon for a test flight to the International Space Station. Suddenly, we saw the rocket going up amongst the cheer of the crowd gathered in the beach. I never thought I would see something like this happening live!

Our company has arranged us to be checked in early, so we went to the port around 10am. I was not aware that we had to leave our suitcases with porters, until one of the other agents told me to do so. We checked in and boarded the ship around 1pm. As we could not go into the cabin till later, we headed for lunch at the Garden Café on deck 15. Wow! I was impressed with the variety of options available. The staff kept the tables cleared and the food refilled quickly as the guests started to arrive.

Our cabin was spacious enough for both of us and our bags. The balcony had a couple of chairs and table. To be honest, we did not spend a lot of time in the balcony other than during the sunset and sunrise to take photos. The cabin was serviced every day. Loved the curved bed. We got our cases delivered to our room around 7pm. We had a welcome letter from the team and as I’d informed the NCL that it was our anniversary that month, they left a card for us too. It was a nice touch to the beginning of our cruise. We also had a phone call from the cruise manager to talk about our dietary requirement. He informed us that all the restaurants can cater for our vegetarian diet. I have to say, we never had any problem having a fantastic vegetarian meal in any of the restaurant we went to. The staff were more than happy to make something else if there weren’t any available on the menu.

We had our breakfast at the Garden café, Great outdoors and Oh Sheehan’s Bar and Grill. All had variety of tasty options, but I preferred the buffet at the Garden Café, particularly their freshly baked French Baguettes. We had lunch twice at the Garden Café and Taste once. The Garden Cafe even had lemon rice ine day for lunch. The table service at Taste was really good and quick. We had dinner at Taste, Epic Manhattan, Shanghai’s and at the Teppanyaki restaurant. Loved the way the chef at Teppanyaki entertained us as he cooked our meal. He made sure that he cooked our vegetarian food before he added the meat. I loved the green tomato ice cream! Yep, GREEN TOMATO. It was an unusual flavour, but was really tasty. This is a specialty restaurant, so there was a charge, whereas the others we had dinner at were complimentary. During our dinner at Shanghai’s, the guests on the next table got a bit loud so, we got the staff to move us to another table a bit further. At Manhattan, they brought a cake at the end of the meal for our anniversary and sang a song too. It was sweet of them to take note of the date and make our meal memorable. There were other specialty restaurants too, but in all honesty, I don’t think on a five-day cruise we could have tried all of them. We tried our best to try a new place every day for lunch and dinner.

We watched Burn the floor and Priscilla Queen of the Desert. We had a sneak preview of Burn the Floor during our company session on the second day. The show was full of energy and entertainment. We also went to the glow party at Spice H2O on Deck 15. It was perfectly led by the entertainment manger and we had loads of fun mingling with other guests. We were meant to go and experience the Ice Bar one afternoon, but never got a chance as we did have some training sessions on the sea days. My colleagues went on the Epic water plunge which I refused to go on as I didn’t want to get stuck in. Believe me, knowing my luck, it would have probably happened to me if I were to have a go!

NCL’s private island in the Bahamas, Great Stirrup Cay was our first stop. We had our company’s party here. They’ve hired all the cabanas for the suppliers and the agents, so we were able to use the cabanas. The crystal blue, warm water and the soft white sand beach was one of the best I’ve been to. They had lots of lounge chairs all around the island. We had to use tenders to get to the island from the cruise ship and using our cabin keys, we got our drinks from the amazing bars with live Caribbean music. It was followed by a fabulous lunch buffet. After our company party, we had enough time to look around the stalls before getting back to the ship.

Our second stop was Cozumel, Mexico. We had booked a shore excursion from the ship. When we docked, the tour leader was there, ready to collect our group. Our bus was a bit late to arrive at the pickup point due to some traffic regulations on that specific day. We went to El Mirador, a beautiful photo stop by the beach, took part in a chocolate workshop at Mayan Cocoa Company, saw the miniatures of Mexican ruins and famous buildings at Discover Mexico and learnt about Mexican culture at Museum of Mexican Traditional Art. The tour ended with Tequila tasting. Didn't realise there are so many varieties to be honest. We also had freshly made tacos from a nearby small food stall! The whole tour lasted longer than it was advertised, and we hardly ever had time to look around the port area. I would have loved to spend a bit more time looking around the area near the port. We got back just in time to go back. I would suggest, if you want to see the real Cozumel, then don't book an excursion. Research where you want to go furst. Get out of the ship and wonder around the port area for a while and get a taxi to take you around the places YOU want to go. This way you are not tied to others.

What I really liked about NCL was that their less formal dining arrangements. Although, the restaurants have dress codes, there weren’t any formal/black tie evenings. It suited my husband perfectly as he tends to avoid wearing suits. Moreover, there were no fixed dinner time for the guests, and it made our lives easier when planning the evening entertainments. The service we were given by the NCL staff was fabulous. The disembarkation process was smoothly done. We paid our outstanding bills the night before and decided to take our bags with us rather than waiting for the porters to bring them back. The service desk staff offered to call the taxi company for me to book one to go to Kennedy Space Centre. We docked around 7am and by 8am we were in our taxi to KSC.

We thoroughly enjoyed our first cruise and cannot wait to go another one soon.